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ON RAVEN WINGS: THE MIDDLE AGES AND THE MARVELOUS

July 24, 2023

Written by John Howe

Heroes & Heorot

Or Ages Dark & Light New books are always a welcome event, especially as they provide an excuse to briefly escape from the studio and get out into the rest of the world a moment. (Like many illustrators, the time spent proportionately in the former as opposed to...

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A Few Words, A Few Pictures

Or Determining How Many Words a Picture is Really Worth at Current Market Value I’ve often considered that artists should be subject to restraining orders, forbidding them to approach any closer than 100 yards to writing about their ownwork. Alas, I am a convicted and...

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Wrapping Up

Or How All Good Things Come to an End I confess to being a creature of habit. Good and bad, of course, but nevertheless… Closing weekend this weekend in Saint-Ursanne. The banners and statues will remain in place until the end of September, but the rest will be packed...

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Just Between Us

Or A Few Words and Some Pictures At rather a loss as to what to actually write for this newsletter, I’ve fallen back on the tried and true method of using something I’ve written before. (I have an excuse, I am working very assiduously writing texts for another book.)...

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Saint-Ursanne

The Rest of the Rest I realize I have been remiss is announcing events in Saint-Ursanne - actually I’ve been a little too busy with what I’ve been doing to think about announcing what I will be doing… Here are the rest of the dates: AUGUST 10th Conference/debate With...

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Bewildered and Bemused

Or the True Nature of Glamour Today, the word “glamour” is more closely associated with ‘50’s film starlets and glossy magazines than with its original meaning. Here is what the dictionaries say: GLAMOUR: 1720, “magic, enchantment” (especially in phrase to cast the...

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The View from Heorot

Or A Room With A View This October, Templar Publishing will be bringing out a new retelling of Beowulf. Of course, being an illustrator, I did a few pictures, but also a few words of introduction, which I wanted to share, with the editor’s permission. (The text had to...

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The Blue Space Between the Clouds

Or All About Standing in the Right Place, Even Briefly Ages ago, in my brief but diligent foray into French-language comics (which are, incidentally, the best in the world) I read one called “The Blue Space Between the Clouds”. Written and drawn by a gentleman named...

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Matters Existential

Or a Bit of This and Some of That I’ve started this newsletter several times. First, I thought I’d write about the fact that I just voted for the first time in my life, and what it meant, in that nebulous out-of-focus way I have of defining my certitudes. Then I...

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Adulthood

Or The Way Where The other day there was a storm gathering over the lake. The sky was a curtain of slate, more mineral than meteorological and the lake itself was a luminous turquoise with a periphral glazing of lead-grey. It was stunning. Even the red light at the...

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Reading and Writing

Or the Ins and Outs of Applied Creativity Been reading a lot of books lately - who would have thought that making images would involve so many words? This of course has the fringe benefit of allowing me a totally frivolous series of purchases on amazon, (“Yes, it’s...

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A Man of Few Words (For Now)

Or Conscience vs. the Muse, Round One I was going to write something witty and philosophical or at least try, but my mind has called in with a bit of a temperature and begged off… The last two weeks have been rather… full - of trips, people, presentations,...

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